Monday, July 3, 2017

Staunton, July 3 – To avoid the
Islamization of the Russian Federation, Andrey Soshenko says, Moscow must immediately
“change its migration policy” to limit the influx of people from Central Asia
and the Caucasus, force the leaders of “Russian territories to stop searching
for ‘multi-nationality,’ and “not allow in the legal code the concept of the
civic Russian nation.”

The president of the Kaluga section of
the Russian Assembly offers a laundry list of changes Russian nationalists have
long wanted, but several of the details of what he says are especially
intriguing and likely to have exactly the opposite impact on the fate of Russia
that he hopes for (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/07/03/islamizacii_rossii_ne_proizojdet_esli/).

Soshenko accepts Roman Silantyev’s
dismissal of recent polls showing that already 30 percent of the Russian
population identifies as Islamic, but he says that the specialist on Islam may
be guilty of exaggerating the growth in the number of ethnic Russians because
the data he offers are old.

But in addition to calling for
filtering out non-tradition Muslims from the gastarbeiter influx, the Russian
activist calls for something the full implications of which he may not
understand but that flows from the Moscow Patriarchate’s notions about “canonical
territories,” that is areas which are historically Orthodox and thus within its
jurisdiction.

Soshenko extends this idea to Islam.
He argues that “state support of Islam (along with Orthodoxy) must occur on the
territories of the historical practice of this religion but not on ethnic
Russian territories. But in practice in Russia today, everything is mixed up
and just the reverse is being done.”

Moscow’s current Strategy of
Nationality Policy and its program for Strengthening the Unity of the Russian
Nation and the Ethno-Cultural Development of the Peoples of Russia promotes the
idea that Russia should become a melting pot of ethnicities in which all will
be combined into something chimerical.

No one is defending the ethnic
Russians against the corrupting influence of this process. But what Soshenko
proposals, dividing the country up into areas defined as Russian with only
Russian institutions and others defined as Muslim with only Muslim institutions
would have the effect of dividing the Russian Federation far more profoundly
than anything up to now.

In this Russian nationalist’s view, today
“there is no long left to defend the interests of ethnic Russians on
historically ethnic Russian territories., there are no Russian communities and
organizations or very few.” Instead, there are government agencies that protect
and promote the interests of everyone else.

Soshenko certainly would be pleased
to have his ideas lead to a ban on the construction of mosques in areas where
Muslims do not have a long history; but he would almost certainly be less
pleased by a ban on Russian Orthodox institutions in areas where Russians do
not have a long history at the same time.

Indeed, his ideas are a recipe for
something that has never happened in Russia before: a religious war, one that
would be far nastier than any ethnic conflict there has ever been and one that
almost certainly would produce exactly the opposite of what he hopes for,
tearing the country apart in the name of holding it together.